Latin heluus, fuluus, flauus and their (probable) relatives
The paper discusses several etymological problems concerning Indo-European paronymic colour-words with semantic feature ‘yellow, green, orange’, preserved in Latin, Balto-Slavic and Germanic languages. The author proposes a new distribution of the words into cognates of *ghel̄- and *bhel- roots and a hypothesis of a possible labial shift in these roots. Also it is noted that Latin had a strong semantic difference between words of matte (bright) and glossy colours. So, all of these three words in question should be separated from that of *bhel(H)- like fulgor, fulmen, russ. белый, блеск, germ. *blēwaz and so on. It is supposed that this approach might be used in other difficult cases of Indo-European lexical nests.
Publication Details
- Journal
- Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
- Published
- 2025-04-29
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15300618
- Primary Topic
- Linguistics and language evolution
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00